Posts tagged with Real Time Bidding

Real-time bidding (RTB) has acquired a bad reputation. It is considered by many to be a scarily complex automated buying mechanism that defies the normal rules of advertising - a technology that only the brightest engineers can fathom.

Most marketers simply don’t believe they have the skills to navigate this exciting media.

An age-old debate in marketing that has begun to rear its head once more: are effective marketing and adverting campaigns born out of art or science?

Creativity lies at the very heart of bringing a campaign to life, but in an era where marketing budgets are under the watchful eye of the board performance has to be measured to demonstrate an impact on business goals.

Recent research brought this to my attention, which found 80% of CEOs believe marketers are “too disconnected” from the financial realities of companies.

Disruptive technological advancements in display advertising have opened a wealth of options for marketers. They can optimise as never before by running personalized, cost-effective, scalable campaigns, in real time.

In the fast-paced world of online advertising, enhanced targeting can generate real time decision making and thus create performance uplift.

Making sense of this real time revolution is a formidable task. My goal in this series is to help marketers put things in place while offering practical advice. In part one, I discussed real time bidding (RTB).

The hot potato in display advertising right now is definitely real-time bidding, something that goes for both the supply side and the demand side of the now famous display eco landscape originally created by LumaPartners.

But to the wider digital marketer, the term “real time bidding” can perhaps be somewhat misconstrued.

Digital media doesn’t need to be traded based on a auction and for this reason, the term 'automated trading' is becoming increasingly popular instead and something we are beginning to use more readily when communicating the benefits to agencies, advertisers and publishers.

The real time revolution in online display advertising is here and it's disrupting the industry. Data-driven performance display ad solutions are pushing the envelope. No wonder that display is growing faster than any other marketing channel, including search.

What's making this possible is the growing use of massive data volume (also called big data) to optimise and personalise campaigns in real time.

Advertisers’ data is now being intertwined with display ad management - they are finally coming together, after years of running untargeted campaigns that resulted in many wasted banners.

I promise to dive deep into big data in a future post (meanwhile, you can read about how best to use first party data in my previous post). Today, the spotlight is on real time.

I have been asked and am happy to give my opinion on real-time bidding (RTB) and branding.
The underlying question for me is more about the definition of 'display
media for branding'.

We are testing and running
branding campaigns depending on clients’ wishes, but there is still lots to
learn about what is possible and what makes sense for our clients.

For a DR (direct response) campaign we have clear KPIs, such as CPA targets,
driving revenue or just simply CTR. However, you could argue that branding is more about an advertiser being seen on a certain publisher or in an
environment of a specific audience.

Traditionally, branding used to be measured through surveys valuing
the impact of online display, TV or outdoor.

Real-time bidding,
data segmentation, and new buying methodologies have made a dinosaur out of the
traditional agency request-for-proposal.

A programmatic approach to budget
allocation and audience discovery is coming soon that will forever transform
the RFP from a static document to an effective attribute matching engine that
can effectively connect the demand and supply sides in media.

According to the recent IAB and PwC study, in 2010 display grew by 27% and search by 8%. If you have been following the growth of display and the rise of DSPs (demand-side platforms) you are no doubt aware that growth has been fuelled by RTB (real-time bidding).

Its growth and similarities are closely aligned to ‘traditional’ search bid management techniques. This is great news for the display industry and highlights great opportunities for the search marketer.

However, are search marketers grasping this opportunity, and do marketers and agencies really understand the new display environment?

Econsultancy has this month published an updated version of the Ad Serving Buyer’s Guide, containing detailed information about the trends and issues affecting the online advertising sector as well as useful advice for those seeking a suitable ad serving supplier.